News

January 27, 2016

Turn on the tap in your kitchen so that it's running at a typical (if not particularly conservative) rate of around three US gallons per minute. Ensure that your drain is working well and leave it flowing for 17 years. By then you will have used the amount of water that the State of California consumes in one minute.

Return after one year and you will have used roughly the volume of groundwater extracted from the Central Valley in one minute.

Last month, I started what I intended to be a series of posts stimulated by "A Reverence for Rivers," the title of the address given by the great hydrogeologist, Luna Leopold, to California Governor Jerry Brown's Drought Conference held nearly thirty years ago. Leopold threw down some challenges in the "philosophy of water management" to an audience that represented all the stakeholders in management of the state's water supplies at a time of what was then a record drought. Today, those records continue to be broken as California enters its fifth consecutive year of drought, and, for much of the state, the third year of "extreme," never mind "exceptional" drought. Yes, some relief is being provided by El Nino precipitation, but that does nothing to change the drought crisis - as shown by the US Drought Monitor image above. At the end of 2014, a NASA analysis indicated that "It will take about 11 trillion gallons of water (42 cubic kilometers) -- around 1.5 times the maximum volume [potential capacity] of the largest U.S. reservoir -- to recover from California's continuing drought." That was a year ago and it's only got worse. At the time of that report, some rains had arrived, but

“It’s not time to start watering your grass,” said Jay Famiglietti, senior water scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena and the lead researcher of the new analysis. “Looking at the numbers, it’s probably going to take about three years to fill the hole.”

The NASA team found that the Sacramento and San Joaquin river basins, key water sources for cities and farms, lost 4 trillion gallons of water each year since 2011, most of it from farmers tapping the underground supply because rivers and reservoirs were low.

How can California still find itself in this amount of trouble when, nearly thirty years ago, in his first incarnation as drought Governor, Brown declared that “this is an era of limits and there are some very hard choices to be made”? One of the reasons that I have only now embarked on this episode of the series of posts is that there are no easy answers, and research and fact-checking leads only into a black hole of conflicting data, never mind the labyrinthine political abyss of western water politics, policy and history. It is clear that, post 1997, Brown and some of the more enlightened interests in California attempted to embark on reform and future drought preparation - but many of the choices proved to be too hard. Yes, there were initiatives to reduce domestic and municipal consumption and these lasted, although Brown, in his second drought incarnation, still had to declare a State of Emergency in January 2014, and a year later, the first ever state-wide mandatory water reductions. Individual Californians and communities have dramatically reduced their consumption (with the notable exception of Beverly Hills celebrities and billionaires), but by far the largest proportion of the 38 billion gallons per day consumed by California goes to agriculture - and therein lies the rub.

Exactly how much water does Californian agriculture use? Well, incredibly nobody really knows and nobody has the day-to-day measurements to know. You can easily, depending on the sources and assumptions, find estimates from 40% to 80% of total water use. In order to find a single group of statistics that have some credibility, it's worth consulting a report put out by the Congressional Research Service in June 2015. Attempting to rationalize the data differences, it is titled California Agricultural Production and Irrigated Water Use and begins:

California ranks as the leading agricultural state in the United States in terms of farm-level sales. In 2012, California’s farm-level sales totaled nearly $45 billion and accounted for 11% of total U.S. agricultural sales. Five counties—Tulare, Kern, Fresno, Monterey, and Merced—rank among the leading agricultural counties in the nation.

Given current drought conditions in California, however, there has been much attention on the use of water to grow agricultural crops in the state. Depending on the data source, irrigated agriculture accounts for roughly 40% to 80% of total water supplies. Such discrepancies are largely based on different survey methods and assumptions, including the baseline amount of water estimated for use (e.g., what constitutes “available” supplies). Two primary data sources are the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and the California Department of Water Resources (DWR). USGS estimates water use for agricultural irrigation in California at 25.8 million acre-feet (MAF), accounting for 61% of USGS’s estimates of total withdrawals. DWR estimates water use withdrawals for agricultural irrigation at 33 MAF, or about 41% of total use. Both of these estimates are based on available data for 2010. These estimates differ from other widely cited estimates indicating that agricultural use accounts for 80% of California’s available water supplies, as reported in media and news reports.

The differences result from arcane variations in the definitions of the words "use," consumption," "withdrawals," and "application." Welcome to the rabbit-hole of terminology, both technical and political. Oh, and also welcome to the "acre-foot." An acre-foot is a volume of water equal to 325,851 gallons (around 1200 cubic metres) and represents the amount of water needed to flood an acre of land one foot deep. In the US, it is the long-standing measure of water volume.

Since Brown's initiatives following the 1970s drought, water use has dropped, partly as a result of domestic frugality, partly following increased efficiency irrigation systems - and the brutal realities of maintaining agriculture in a semi-arid land. However, the USGS reports that California in 2010 remained the chart-topper of all US states for water consumption - more than half again as much as the runner-up, Texas. And the USGS estimates that agriculture accounts for 60% of the state's thirst.

Any, even brief, review of media reports will reveal that to say that this is a controversial topic is a gross understatement. Vested interests, lobbies, open and hidden agendas, battle for dominance in issues scarcely tainted by facts or science. And these arguments also take place in a virtually policy-free environment - water regulations and laws in the arid Western US are labyrinthine, opaque, complex beyond normal comprehension and certainly unfit for purpose, particularly in California. In 1991, during yet another drought, Peter Passell, an economics writer for the New York Times, wrote that California's water system - infrastructure and laws - "might have been invented by a Soviet bureaucrat on an LSD trip... While this infrastructure was built with state and Federal money, the benefits are by tradition (and, hazily, by law) reserved for the private interests who lobbied for its construction."

California's surface water supply system resembles nothing more than a Heath Robinson contraption or a Rube Goldberg machine, deliberately over-engineered to perform a simple task in a complicated fashion. But at least the State Government has some ability to regulate it. In a normal year that's an ability to attempt to manage and allocate perhaps 70% of the state's water consumption. In a typical drought year that drops to less than 40%. In extreme drought conditions, the state can - and does - dramatically reduce surface water allocations but then where does the other 60-70% come from? Groundwater. Over which the government has virtually no control whatsoever. It doesn't even have the knowledge or the data to manage its groundwater, never mind the legal ability to do so.

And here is the vital fact that is mostly ignored or unknown in political and commercial circles, largely because it's highly inconvenient: surface water and groundwater are part of the same system, the hydrological cycle - mess with one and you mess with the other.

Over 60 years ago, Luna Leopold and his colleague, Harold Thomas, wrote an article titled "Ground Water in North America: The fast-growing demands on this natural resource expose a need to resolve many hydrologic unknowns." Here's an extract:

There are enough examples of streamflow depletion by ground-water development, and of ground-water pollution from wastes released into surface waters, to attest to the close though variable relation between surface water and ground water.

Man has coped with the complexity of water by trying to compartmentalize it. The partition committed by hydrologists—into ground water, soil water, surface water, for instance—is as nothing compared with that which has been promulgated by the legal profession, which has on occasion borrowed from the criminal code to term some waters "fugitive" and others, a "common enemy." The legal classification of water includes "percolating waters," "defined underground streams," "underflow of surface streams," "water-courses." and "diffuse surface waters"; all these waters are actually interrelated and interdependent, yet in many jurisdictions unrelated water rights rest upon this classification

Water habitually does not subscribe to our efforts at compartmentalization according to special interests in irrigation, industrial use, recreational use, municipal use; or to allocations of fields for the chemist, for the geologist, for the sanitary engineer, for the physicist, for this or that government agency, any more than it does to separation into areas bounded by property lines, county lines, state lines, or even some river-basin boundaries. As the areas of heavy demand expand toward each other and the necessity for water management increases, these artificial boundaries and classifications will have to yield more and more to the realities of the hydrologic cycle.

Ah yes, the lessons we have learned in 60 years. In an article in July of last year for the New York Times, Abrahm Lustgarten, an environmental reporter for ProPublica, summarized a report he had written for the site (the whole piece is well-worth reading). From the summary, titled "How the West Overcounts Its Water Supplies":

In California, the state’s water agency has said that the failure to account for how groundwater withdrawals affect the state’s rivers is a major impediment to a true accounting of its resources. In April, authorities reported that less than half of the state’s local water agencies had complied with a 2002 law that made them eligible for state funds only if they set up groundwater management plans and determined if a connection between surface water and groundwater existed. That connection does not exist uniformly and varies depending on local geology. Only 17 percent of the state’s groundwater basins had been examined.

Indeed, California still doesn’t require that water pumped from underground be measured at all, much less factored into an overall assessment of total water resources; it’s merely an option under a new law signed last September.

California’s new groundwater legislation does require local water authorities to come up with sustainable groundwater plans, but they don’t have to do that until 2020, and they don’t have to balance their water withdrawals until 2040.

So fierce was the pushback by the agriculture industry against any regulation of underground water that the new law, somewhat perversely, explicitly barred any attempt by the state to count the groundwater withdrawals as coming from one overall water supply until local agencies had at least 10 more years to come up with — and implement — their plans.

“Those who have unlimited water supply don’t particularly like the idea of changing that,” said Fran Pavley, a Democrat and the California state senator who drafted two of the three bills that became the groundwater law. “You can’t manage what you don’t measure.”

Thomas Buschatzke, the director of Arizona’s Department of Water Resources, acknowledged that pumping from wells could dry up streams, but said the current law kept the two resources separate, and “it would be a huge upset to the economy to do away with that.”

But John Bredehoeft, a leading hydrogeologist and former director of the federal government’s Western states water program, bluntly emphasized the importance of basic honesty in counting water.

“If you don’t connect the two, then you don’t understand the system,” he said. “And if you don’t understand the system, I don’t know how in the hell you’re going to make any kind of judgment about how much water you’ve got to work with.”

Until state officials do, it seems unlikely that there will be any real solution to managing the Southwest’s strained water resources for the future.

And, in the words of Jay Famiglietti:

Managing our water in this context will require an overhaul of existing water policy that matches our modern understanding of the water cycle. Surface and groundwater are tightly interconnected and should be managed accordingly. The rule of capture for groundwater worked exceedingly well when we shot bears with muskets. Let's not kid ourselves that we're great stewards when most of our available water -- groundwater -- is still offered up in a land rush.

We must treat and price water as the precious commodity that it truly is. That means conserve, reuse, recycle, and then do it all over again. Enhanced conservation and efficiency is cheap, easy, and incredibly effective.

So, turn on your tap for a year and contemplate the disappearance of groundwater in California's Central Valley every minute. You could at least rush home and turn off the tap - the government of the State of California can't. We'll talk about all this some more in the next episode...

July 17, 2014

Stevenage: for readers outside of the UK it may not ring much of a bell, and indeed, with no disrespect to Stevenagians, for most UK readers it is not one of our most famous and glamorous metropolitan areas. Located around 50 km north of London, Stevenage has Roman and Saxon roots and has been a market town for more than a millennium. Its name may originate from the Old English for ‘place of the strong oak’, but exactly why its coat of arms depicts a sword thrust through the heart of the oak remains something of a mystery to me.

But Stevenage has one claim to fame that originated close to a century ago and continues today: what is sometimes referred to as a military-industrial complex. The English Electric Company established a facility for making aircraft parts and engines there in 1918, and continued to do through the Second World War. Furthermore, according to the Royal Aeronautical Society, “it is also thought that… there was a secret explosive weapons establishment which designed and created sabotage devices.” In the 1950s and 60s Britain’s very own intercontinental ballistic missile, Blue Streak, was assembled at Stevenage and shipped to Australian desert where the requirements for its testing (along with nuclear devices) emptied the land of its native inhabitants and changed the outback forever. The remains of the first missile launched from Woomera on June 5th, 1964, were discovered not far from Giles Meteorological Station in Western Australia in 1980 and are on display there (after a hardly intercontinental journey of perhaps a thousand kilometers):

For more of the story of the British militarisation of the Australian desert, I recommend my next book, but enough advertising and back to Stevenage. The aerospace facilities there continue to thrive and are now the location for Airbus Defence and Space and Paradigm Secure Communications, housing “Airbus Defence and Space’s spacecraft design and build facility and the headquarters of Paradigm Secure Communications.” They are also now the location for the very large sand pit that is affectionately referred to as ‘Mars Yard’. As the European Space Agency reported recently:

A state-of-the-art ‘Mars yard’ is now ready to put the ExoMars rover through its paces before the vehicle is launched to the Red Planet in 2018.

ESA, the UK Space Agency and Airbus Defence and Space opened the renovated test area in Stevenage, UK, today.

ExoMars is a joint endeavour between ESA and Russia’s Roscosmos space agency. Comprising two missions for launch to Mars in 2016 and 2018, ExoMars will address the outstanding scientific question of whether life has ever existed on the planet, by investigating the atmosphere and drilling into the surface to collect and analyse samples.

Extended Mars Yard opening

The programme will also demonstrate key technologies for entry, descent, landing, drilling and roving.

Filled with 300 tonnes of sand, the 30 x 13 m Mars yard at the Stevenage site of Airbus Defence and Space mimics the appearance of the martian [sic] landscape. Its walls, doors and all interior surfaces are painted a reddish-brown colour to ensure the rover’s navigation cameras are confronted by as realistic a scenario as possible. … The yard will also be available after the rover has landed on Mars in 2019, to help overcome any challenging situations that might be encountered on the Red Planet.

The sand pit was honoured by a visit by a leading politician, the Secretary of State for Business – how often does a political photo-op feature suits in the sand?

And, of course, the stirring declaration that

The ExoMars rover represents the best of British high-value manufacturing… The technologies developed as part of the programme, such as autonomous navigation systems, new welding materials and techniques, will also have real impacts on other sectors, helping them stay on the cutting edge.

Not only is it hugely exciting that Europe’s next mission to Mars will be British-built, but it is incredibly rewarding to see the benefits of our investment in the European Space Agency creating jobs here in the UK.

June 28, 2014

Being still in the throes of editing and correcting the proofs for the new book (with the exception of compiling the index, the least enjoyable part of the whole process), I am particularly paranoid about fact-checking. I have one important (and, I'm sure, obvious) piece of advice: never believe anything you read or see in the press or on the web, without at least a triple-fact-check.

I intend, in tandem with the new book, to evolve this blog naturally into looking at topics arid as well as arenaceous, and, as I have been doing for the last few years, I keep an eye on the news. I just came across a wonderful illustration of the fact that there remains an awful lot new under the sun still to be discovered – on every scale. As I emphasise in the book, while our awareness of the complexity, diversity and value of the ecosystems of arid lands is a long way behind that of temperate and tropical environments, we are, nevertheless, redressing that imbalance on a daily basis. Take, for example, the just-announced discovery of a new species of desert mammal, the weird and wonderful Macroscelides micus:

Scientists from the California Academy of Sciences have discovered a new species of round-eared sengi, or elephant-shrew, in the remote deserts of southwestern Africa. This is the third new species of sengi to be discovered in the wild in the past decade. It is also the smallest known member of the 19 sengis in the order Macroscelidea. The team’s discovery and description of the Etendeka round-eared sengi (Macroscelides micus) is published this week in the Journal of Mammalogy.

Sengis are otherwise known as elephant-shrews because they have a snout that resembles an elephant’s trunk, but they are not shrews – indeed, remarkably, they are more closely related to elephants. But the fact is that they are in a class of their own. Again from the California Academy of Sciences:

Few mammals have had a more colorful history of misunderstood ancestry than the elephant-shrews, or sengis. Most species were first described by Western scientists in the mid to late 19th century, when they were considered closely related to true shrews, hedgehogs, and moles in the order Insectivora. Since then, there has been an increasing realization that they are not closely related to any other group of living mammals, resulting in biologists mistakenly associating them with ungulates, primates, and rabbits. The recent use of molecular techniques to study evolutionary relationships, in addition to the more traditional morphological methods, has confirmed that elephant-shrews represent an ancient monophyletic African radiation. Most biologists currently include the elephant-shrews in a new supercohort, the Afrotheria, which encompasses several other distinctive African groups or clades. These include elephants, sea cows, and hyraxes (the Paenungulata); the aardvark and elephant-shrews, and the golden-moles and tenrecs.

The newly-discovered round-eared sengi is a charming little critter (image by John P. Dumbacher, the lead author of the paper):

Macroscelides micus is a true xerocole, an animal cleverly adapted to living – indeed, thriving – in arid conditions. This sengi lives on and around the Etendeka Plateau, a large area of volcanic rocks formed 130 million years ago as the South Atlantic was beginning to form – they were originally connected to the vast landscapes of the Paraná volcanics of Brazil.

This image from the California Academy of Sciences paper shows this stark and remote terrain (together with an example of the bizarre and unique xerophyte, welwitschia – but that’s another story):

Which brings me back to the beginning of this post and a slight rant about fact-checking. Like, I am sure, most of us, when a topic like this comes up, one of the first questions is where exactly is the Etendeka Plateau? Look at the two maps at the head of this post. On the left is the map reproduced in an article on the discovery in one of our illustrious British newspapers (and yes, given the recent news, I’m being sarcastic). Accompanied by the words “Mapped: Found in a remote area of Namibia, on the inland edge of the Namib Desert (mapped) at the base of the Etendeka Plateau”, it places the poor sengis right in the midst of the dunes of the Namib sand sea. Xerocoles they may be, but that’s pushing things a bit too far. The correct location – some 500 kms north – is shown on the right-hand map and is clearly illustrated in detail in the original paper if anyone had cared to check.

I find this time and time again. Google maps can’t even get my home location in London right, so why believe a map of an obscure and remote location reproduced in a newspaper? The answer is simply for no reason at all. It’s a sobering thought – if, on so many occasions, a simple fact-check on something you are particularly interested in reveals sloppiness and error, what about all the other stuff we don’t bother to fact-check?

More than fifty years ago, my parents particularly enjoyed the production that opened the newly constructed Mermaid Theatre in London (now sadly, and controversially, converted to a ‘Conference and Events Centre’). The play was a musical, based on an 18th century comedy by Henry Fielding, and included the satirical song It must be true. I remember, for years after, my father periodically singing to himself the opening line: “It must be true, for I read it in the papers, didn’t you?”

May 13, 2013

Back in the very early days of this blog, one of the great and rewarding
pieces of serendipity was getting to know Larry Deemer, sand aficionado and
photographer extraordinaire. I first published a selection
of his stunning images back in April 2009, and there have been subsequent
collaborations on ice,
horseshoe
crabs, and scale. And
in the meantime, he has published a glorious book of his sand pattern
images. Most importantly, also in the meantime, we have become good friends and
it’s a great pleasure to post a selection of his latest photos of the creative
conspiracy between waves, foam, and sand.

But there’s a backstory, and a dramatic one. In that first post I wrote that
Larry is “lucky enough to live in Breezy Point, a coastal neighbourhood in
Queens, the borough of New York City,” and indeed my wife and I were lucky enough to visit
Larry, Lou, and Buck and enjoy their company, their home, and their beach. But
then, in October of last year, Hurricane Sandy rolled the dice and the luck of
the residents of Breezy Point changed – catastrophically. They were hit not only
by damage from the storm (which would have been relatively manageable), but by a
devastating fire that raged out of control and destroyed over a hundred
homes. Over 200 more were terminally damaged and have been bulldozed. Larry was,
in this sense, lucky: the water damage to their house was reparable and
they have been back home since the middle of January, feeling, as Larry has
commented, “like pioneers.” But not home as it used to be – houses around them
are no longer there, and the process of rebuilding is stalled by the absurdities
of bureaucracy. We use the term “community” somewhat loosely these days, but
Breezy Point was – and is – a real community; just read some of the stories on
the web to appreciate what the word really means.

But nature continues her activities, oblivious to human hardship, and the
beach, although “the 6’ dunes are now 2’ dunes',” continues to be an
inspiration. Thanks, Larry.

[Soon after writing this post, I heard from Susanne Rieth who runs a blog called Rockaway Rises - Rockaway is right next to Breezy Point. The blog is well worth a look, described thus: "Rockaway Rises is a community for sharing and enjoying the positive aspects of life on our fair peninsula. We welcome submissions of photography, art work and uplifting stories that remind us why we love it here, and why we will continue to thrive here in spite of Hurricane Sandy. No devastation and destruction. Only gratitude for what we still have, the ocean and our community."]

January 29, 2013

There is something of a mystery, an historical debate, about who exactly
caused the burning of the great Library at Alexandria. There is, however, no
mystery about who torched the library in Timbuktu.

Some years back, while researching the Sand book, I became
fascinated by the stories of the manuscripts of Timbuktu, many of them dating
back to the thirteenth century:

It is not only the dryness of the climate that preserves ancient
manuscripts—the desiccating properties of sand can do the same directly…
Timbuktu holds dramatic illustrations of this. From around a.d. 1300 to 1500,
the fabled city was a great seat of learning, with students and scholars coming
from far away to study, learn, and debate. But after its fall, many of its
archives became dispersed or lost. However, in recent years, following more
peaceful times in Mali, literally thousands of manuscripts have been recovered
from where they had been hidden, in caves or directly in the desert sand.

“More peaceful times in Mali” – how times do change. Back then, Mauritania,
Mali, the Festival of the Desert, were high on my bucket list of destinations, a
fine illustration of the foolishness of procrastination. And when I read in the
news this morning that the manuscript collections had been burned by the fleeing
“rebels,” I was ready to weep. I reached in vain for words that would properly
describe this act and the individuals who committed it, until I settled on
“obscene” and “evil,” words that apply to essentially all of the actions of these people.

As the culmination of decades of work, largely stimulated by UNESCO, and with
the collaboration of the Malian and South African Governments, the support of
the Ford Foundation, funding from Kuwait, and the expertise of the University of
Capetown, the Ahmed
Baba Institute of Higher Learning and Islamic Research opened the doors of
its new building in 2009. It housed collections of literally priceless manuscripts and the
facilities and staff to finally document and preserve them. On Monday came the
news
that it had been destroyed.

However, at the time of writing, there is a glimmer of hope – not, perhaps, for the
facility but for the manuscripts. Time
magazine reports that, in anticipation of exactly what happened, a
significant number of them had been quietly removed and hidden; history
repeating itself, ironically:

In interviews with TIME on Monday, preservationists said that in a
large-scale rescue operation early last year, shortly before the militants
seized control of Timbuktu, thousands of manuscripts were hauled out of the
Ahmed Baba Institute to a safe house elsewhere. Realizing that the documents
might be prime targets for pillaging or vindictive attacks from Islamic
extremists, staff left behind just a small portion of them, perhaps out of
haste, but also to conceal the fact that the center had been deliberately
emptied.

Let us hope that this is true.

Update 2 February: grounds for optimism - it seems likely that the majority of the manuscripts were indeed removed and hidden safely.

November 30, 2012

In the aftermath of the real super-storm (or hurricane) Sandy, there has been, not
surprisingly, a super-storm of reporting, opinionating, blogging, and
twittering. This is good – there is, in certain quarters at least, some kind of
debate going on. However, I have a problem, and so, to wrap up the current sequence of the
ongoing theme, I will add my two cents to the maelstrom.

The cover, above, from a recent issue of Bloomberg Business Week
illustrates my problem quite well. Putting aside my resentment at being
addressed as stupid (I’m sure it wasn’t meant personally), I should say that the
cover
article is good in many respects. It begins, perhaps a little petulantly,
“Yes, yes, it’s unsophisticated to blame any given storm on climate change” and
goes on to declare that “Clarity, however, is not beyond reach. Hurricane Sandy
demands it…” Then, in my opinion, it fails in its own quest for clarity by
confounding two vital issues, two problems, both of which need to be urgently
addressed – although these problems are related, the paths to successfully
addressing them are distinct, and this distinction is lost in the furore. And
Bloomberg are not alone.

The challenge of managing our coasts is not
the same as the challenge of “managing” climate change. We urgently need a
rigorous, evidence-based, approach to developing policy on both – but with
the recognition that the solutions are distinct. Coastal management policy
should be informed by analysis of the changing climate but should not
be dependent on it.Successfully addressing global warming is neither a pre-requisite nor the solution for coastal management.

Here’s a simple summary of my argument (not that I claim any intellectual
property rights whatsoever – I am simply following the logic of the
experts):

The consequences of the damage caused by even a relativelymodest storm such as Sandy are socially, financially, economically, and
environmentally unsustainable.

More – and more violent – storms are inevitable, regardless of global
warming, and their frequency and targets impossible to predict.

It is likely that warming oceans are exacerbating the strength and frequency
of storms and hurricanes such as Sandy – but then the situation is arguably bad
enough already.

Any hoped-for global action to address global warming will operate on a
timeframe that is irrelevant to storm frequency in the foreseeable future and
the consequent immediate coastal management issues.

Fundamental reform of the current free-for-all in coastal development needs
to be an immediate and local issue, distinct from any longer-term actions to
reduce emissions and ameliorate climate change.

So when a video report included in the Bloomberg piece tells me that
“our cover story this week may generate controversy, but only among the stupid,”
I have to take exception. It’s not that they don’t hit many of the components –
insurance costs and so on - and their message that “We have to pay attention”
is, of course, correct. Their concluding statement is absolutely correct: “The
U.S. can’t afford regular Sandy-size disruptions in economic activity. To limit
the costs of climate-related disasters, both politicians and the public need to
accept how much they’re helping to cause them.” But, at the same time, there’s
my problem – Sandy was a “climate-related disaster” independent of climate
change; and yes, “politicians and the public need to accept how much they’re
helping to cause them,” but the immediate cause of the scale of the disaster
is not inactivity on climate change.

I really don’t mean for this to be tirade against the Bloomberg
article – after all, it succeeded in its intention to be controversial, and
that’s a good thing; it’s simply symptomatic of what I feel is a muddying of the
waters. But let’s clarify what we should be arguing about. Bill Hooke at
Living on the Real World hit the proverbial nail on the head in “Hurricane Sandy’s Real
Lesson…will we learn it?”:

America needs a comparable national effort and accompanying long-term
investment in reducing the need for emergency response on such a grand
scale.

The need for emergency response will never go away. But we shouldn’t resign
ourselves to the idea that emergencies will necessarily continue to grow in
scope, number and impact, just because our society is growing in numbers, in
property exposure, and in economic activity. We can grow our society’s
resilience to such events. We can reduce the geographical extent and the
population adversely affected by future events.

Exactly (except that it’s not just about America). The issue is resilience –
and adaptation, and sustainability.

And some further words of wisdom from Rob Young, often quoted in this blog,
from a New
York Times piece, “As Coasts Rebuild and U.S. Pays, Repeatedly, the
Critics Ask Why”:

“The best thing that could possibly come out of Sandy is if the political
establishment was willing to say, ‘Let’s have a conversation about how we do
this differently the next time,’ ” said Dr. Young, a coastal geologist who
directs the Program for the Study of
Developed Shorelines at Western Carolina University. “We need to identify
those areas — in advance — that it no longer makes sense to
rebuild.”

That’s one urgent issue. Climate change is another one.

From Judith Kildow (who directs the National Ocean Economics Program at the
Monterey Institute of International Studies), and Jason Scorse, an associate
professor of economics at the institute, in a New York Timesopinion
piece a couple of days ago:

IT’S no surprise that it can be very expensive to live near the ocean. But it
may come as a surprise to American taxpayers that they are on the hook for at
least $527 billion of vulnerable assets in the nation’s coastal flood plains.
Those homes and businesses are insured by the federal government’s National
Flood Insurance Program.

You read that right: $527 billion, which is just a portion of the program’s
overall liability of $1.25 trillion, second only to Social Security in the
liabilities on the government’s ledgers last year, according to government data.

…The bottom line is that the flood insurance program is a fiscal time bomb
for the government.

We should phase out the program, begin thinking strategically about how to
shift populations away from the most risky coastal areas, and use the best
available science to update the woefully out-of-date coastal-zone risk profiles
that government agencies currently rely on to determine danger. We also need to
encourage more stringent building codes that take into account the full range of
climate risks.

The prospect of future storms like Sandy is not something where our best
future course of action at all plain and obvious. The magnitude of public
investments that has been discussed is immense, and these projects must compete
against a great many other compelling priorities. The land use decisions we
face are heartbreaking — we seem to be left with a choice between rebuilding
communities in places that will continue to be vulnerable to storms like Sandy,
or not rebuilding them and requiring their residents and the rest of us to lose
an immense amount of what we value. Perhaps a small fraction of the tens of
billions of dollars we’re talking about for sea walls and flood gates should go
to offering to buy out the homeowners in the extremely vulnerable areas — that
should probably be on the table. After the devastating earthquake and tsunami
in Chile in 2010, serious land use restrictions were imposed on coastal areas
that continue to be vulnerable to such events. That, too, should be on the
table. Some really tough decisions lie ahead — and failure to make a decision
is itself a decision, but often the worst one.

September 01, 2012

It was tempting to make the subject of this entire post the egregious
activities of the outstanding American buffoon, Donald Trump (plea
to trans-Atlantic readers: if you can’t do anything else about him, could you please
keep him away from our shores?). As documented in the recent film, You’ve
Been Trumped (which I haven’t yet seen, but perhaps look forward to),
an entire stretch of the natural Scottish coastal dune system has been destroyed
by Trump’s typically megalomaniacal golf course development (aided and abetted,
it has to be said, by the Scottish Government). It is, of course, ironic, that
it was the topography of dune ridges that first brought the game to Scotland –
as I described in Sand:

The Old English word for ridges is hlincas, from which the term
links is derived, and it was in this terrain that small leather balls
stuffed with goose feathers were first whacked about and the revered game of
golf—or gouff, or goffe—originated. Many of the world’s finest
golf courses, including the Old Course at the Royal and Ancient Golf Club at St.
Andrews on the east coast of Scotland, owe their location to coastal dune
systems.

A second irony (a word that hardly seems adequate) is that “The Donald” has
the gall to Trumpet his scheme as environmentally beneficial. This, from an NYT
interview with Anthony Baxter, the film’s director:

Q. Mr. Trump is on the record as saying that his
development would be “environmentally perfect ” and that the area would in fact
be better off environmentally after the golf course was built. Were there any
major environmental groups that supported the project?

A. There was not one credible environmental group that
supported this development. Friends of the Earth Scotland, Scottish Natural
Heritage, the Scottish Wildlife Trust, the Royal Society for the Protection of
Birds, the Ramblers Association of Scotland — all of these groups were dead set
against this development.

The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds actually issued a press release
when Mr. Trump was given the go-ahead saying that Scotland’s green policy had
been sold down the river by this decision. Not a single expert was standing up
and saying that it made sense to tamper with this very unique sand dunes
system.

But the management of Britain’s coastal dunes raises questions far beyond the
tragic activities of one aggressive clown.

Coastal dune systems are, by nature, dynamic. On the front line of the power
struggle between land and sea, pounded by winds and storms, they are almost
always on the move. However, unlike their desert counterparts, the intervening
quiet periods allow specialised – and hardy – vegetation to take root; there’s a
remarkably diverse ecosystem of plants that enjoy a substrate of shifting sand.
If the vegetative cover comes to dominate, then the dunes become stabilised,
resistant to the day-to-day attacks of wind and waves, if not to powerful
storms. And, because the mobility of coastal dune systems is inconvenient to the
human inhabitants of those environments, who wish to bask in vistas that are
static and benign, conscious attempts to stabilise with vegetation (if not
completely remove) coastal dunes are common. This activity, combined with the
reduction in free-range grazing of animal herds, and a fluctuating climate, have
caused a wholesale change in the UK’s natural coastal dune systems.

I’m not someone who routinely consults the horticultural experts in the
media, but I was struck by a piece in Friday’s Guardian newspaper that
began:

What has happened to Britain's sand dunes? My childhood recollections are of
wild and windy places; of a fine spindrift of sandy particles streaming from the
dune ridges; of marram grass etching precise circles in dry sand with the tips
of their leaves; of wavering films of sand flowing across rippled sands. Fast
forward 50 years, and … the golden sand has been replaced by a thick thatch of
matted grass, burgeoning stands of bracken and scrub, and increasing groves of
willow and birch. And as bare sand has become something of a rarity, so many
beautiful sand dune species have declined to near-oblivion today. Many of our
rarer plants and animals have spent millennia evolving to cope with shifting
sands. Like carrot seedlings in an allotment, they need bare ground into which
to seed, and simply can't compete with choking blankets of coarse
vegetation.

Written by Andy Byfield, one of the founders of the wild plant charity Plantlife, the piece argues
that “Drastic action is needed to save the native plants that thrive on our sand
dunes.”

It’s understandable to assume that flowering plants that thrive in sand
must reflect desiccation and struggle in their appearance. But the opposite is
often the case – for example, from my recent Australian desert trip:

And this is as true of the British
coast as it is of Australia’s red centre. The image at the head of this post
is of the spectacular Sea Holly, Eryngium maritimum, that Byfield
justifiably dubs the “king of the dunes”:

an architectural beauty of the sandy beaches and sand dunes around our
shores. The plant's central cone of flowers is reminiscent of members of the
daisy family, such as echinacea or rudbeckia, but sea holly is a relative of the
carrot. The ruff of petals is actually a ring of spiny bracts that encircle and
protect the flowers like the plates of a Stegosaurus or the frills of a
Triceratops. The whole plant is a metallic blue-green, seemingly verdigrised
like a bronze garden statue in miniature.

He goes on to describe the sea holly as typical of the plants that need open,
moving sand and are being extinguished by the overly (and coarsely) vegetated
character of their favourite environment today:

Sea holly is supremely adapted to growing in mobile sand. Its deep-seated
rootstock penetrates the substrate to a depth of 1m or more, and the plant takes
a masochistic delight in being buried by an avalanche of sand…

Fortunately, as a species of the exposed foredunes (those next to the beach),
sea holly is not faring as badly as some: indeed many other dune plants are
faring badly. Take the fen orchid, an
elusive green orchid of the South Welsh dunes: known to be locally abundant just
a few decades ago, the species has declined from hundreds of thousands of plants
at 10 sites to just a few hundred plants at one location today.

A typical stretch of South Welsh dunes is along the coast at Kenfig, the
namesake settlement of which also figured in Sand:

Kenfig was established in the twelfth century as a small port and farming
community on a river sheltered by the coastal dunes. It survived the attacks of
marauding Welsh tribes, but not the forces of nature, provoked by grazing and
the ensuing destabilization of the sand. These factors, probably combined with
climate change as the cold period often referred to as “the Little Ice Age”
approached, meant that the dunes were on the move. By the fourteenth century,
large parts of the town and its fields were covered, and by the middle of the
seventeenth century, it was completely abandoned.

But these days the dunes are no longer on the move and have become, possibly
also as a result of the nutritious nature of polluted rain, vegetated and
stable – hence the struggles of the fen orchid and the sea holly. And so a
radical experiment has just been launched – the dunes are being bulldozed, not
in the interests of a megalomaniac, but in order to restore the original
biodiversity. The project is led by Byfield, who is Plantlife’s
Landscape Conservation Manager, and involves removing all vegetation from ten
acres of sand. The following is from the project website:

Only 2% of the dune system at Kenfig now comprises bare sand, down from
around 40% in the mid 1940s. Early plant colonists including sea rocket, sea
holly and yellow horned-poppy need bare sand to colonise – and these suffer if a
dune system becomes too stable.

Regular ground disturbance and open patches of sand will reduce the
dominance of vigorous plant species and allow rarer, less vigorous species to
return. As well as fen orchid, other declining species which will benefit
include round leaved-wintergreen, marsh helleborine and early marsh orchid.

Plantlife will be introducing trial management work aimed at encouraging fen
orchid and allowing better conditions for many other species including the rare
dune bryums and petalwort to develop.

This will be a fascinating experiment in reversing natural and human-induced
environmental change.

And, while I am discussing Eryngium maritimum, I must report some
interesting commentary that I came across with respect to its truly
extraordinary and diverse medicinal applications. It (particularly its root) is
variously described as curing and stimulating flatulence, as an
aphrodisiac, a diuretic, a potent inflammation modulator, and an inducer of
extreme perspiration. The name of the genus Eryngium is supposedly
derived from the Greek for eructation, and, furthermore, Plutarch is reported as
telling the story that

'They report of the Sea Holly, if one goat taketh it into her mouth, it
causeth her first to stand still and afterwards the whole flock, until such time
as the shepherd takes it from her.'

August 17, 2012

Countless words have been written – appropriately – over the last couple of weeks, in the blogosphere and the international press, about Curiosity. I have little to add, except for a personal note of awe and gratitude.

The landing was scheduled for about an hour before my flight landed in Singapore, and the first thing I did after disembarking was to hook up to Google News – and there it was, incredibly, awe-inspiringly, it had worked, and Curiosity was flexing its muscles on the surface of Mars. I will readily admit that I haven’t the faintest clue how this whole, mind-bogglingly complex, mission was planned and executed; I watched and relished the infectious celebrations in the control room with only a partial sense of the true emotions of every individual there.

And then – a picture is truly worth a thousand words – the images started coming in.

When I looked at that image, and understood that the hills in the distance were not on Curiosity’s fieldwork itinerary, my immediate reaction was “Well, why don’t I wander over there and have a look at that winding valley system, while you go off and do your stuff. We’ll meet back here this afternoon.” Curiosity feels, intimately, like a fellow field-geologist – because, of course, that’s exactly what the rover is. I now check out the mission site routinely to see what my friend has been up to, and to continue to celebrate this incredible achievement.

And, for me, the other cause for celebration is simply that, faced daily with the stories of the depravity, greed, and ignorance of our bizarre species, this provides a strong antidote, grounds for cautious, if perhaps fleeting, optimism. Thank you, NASA, JPL, Caltech, and everyone involved.